Daptiv Community

ProjectTransit Restored

Bahwah — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 20:01:00 GMT

ProjectTransit services have been restored as of noon Pacific Time. Customers will be prompted to install a new, corrected version when they first open ProjectTransit.

If you should you continue to receive an error during synchronization, you'll need to contact Daptiv Support for some follow-up. We appreciate your patience, and look forward to working with you.

ProjectTransit Outage

Bahwah — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:07:00 GMT

ProjectTransit has been disabled once more to reconcile some lingering issues. Unfortunately, we do not have an ETR at this time.

We are currently working to resolve this issue, and will provide an update as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience in the meantime.

Daptiv PPM Winter '09 is LIVE!

danderson — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 23:13:00 GMT

Daptiv is pleased to announce the release of Daptiv PPM Summer '09

Daptiv PPM Winter '09 extends use of the leading On-demand PPM solution to multiple languages, browsers and platforms, giving users more choices than ever to use the system in the ways they want.

Daptiv PPM localized in French, German & Spanish

With the launch of Winter ‘09, users can now use PPM in French, German & Spanish as well as in English. Using the individual language/culture setting, team members experience the software in their language, while collaborating with other members of the enterprise. Note: Daptiv’s corporate website, daptiv.com is now localized too, for the convenience of its international customers and prospects.

Now Supporting FireFox and Mac

Besides the new languages, Daptiv PPM Winter ‘09 also provides new browser and platform alternatives for users. Daptiv PPM now supports FireFox 3.0 (Internet Explorer & Macintosh), opening up another browser choice for individuals and enterprises.

More for Managers: Next-Generation Gantt Chart

Daptiv PPM’s next generation Gantt Chart (BETA) is packed with enhancements to make it easier to manage tasks and projects. It’s faster, has more filters, and lets users add more tasks. It also zooms to fit the portion of the schedule users want to see, lets users create multiple dependency types by clicking-and-dragging, and more. The new Gantt chart saves users time by letting them create their project schedules directly in a browser without using external project tools.

Another time-saver for managers: enhancements to Team Manager lets Project Managers and (and Resource Managers) request (and approve) individual resources rather than just resource types.

More for Administrators

- Changes to Billing Rates history will improve accuracy of historical calculations and reporting.

- Updates to the ProjectTransit client improve the usability of this utility for integrating with Microsoft Project.

- Daptiv Outlook Integration now auto-updates when a new client is available – no more manual upgrades needed.

More for Team Members

Daptiv PPM Winter ‘09 gives users control to receive notifications when and how they want them, including:

- Setting up consolidated “digest” notifications that can be grouped by project or application, and sent to the user weekly or daily during a specified time period

- Suspending notifications (e.g. for vacations, out-of-office, etc.)

- Changing notification format between HTML and text

- Setting notification preferences by Daptiv PPM application (e.g. one set of preferences for Tasks but another for Issues)

- Updating all notification settings from a single location.

Daptiv PPM Winter ‘09 introduces a new Help system to give team members better, easier access to help topics and an improved search engine for getting their answers faster.

If a lot of these features sound familiar, it might be because several popular Greenhouse features are represented here -- around 2,000 "points" worth. Thanks for your input in the Greenhouse, and enjoy Winter '09!

Creating a report that lists all report authors

Kevin — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 22:36:00 GMT

Have you ever needed to know who else in your organization is a report author? Ever wondered if they had the answer that you're looking for. but you didn't know who else creates reports? This simple report will allow you so see who else in your organization is a Report Author or Advanced Report Author. You do need to be a report author to create the report.

In Daptiv, click the "Reports" tab, and "Create Report".
In the left side navigation pane, expand the folder named "Enterprise User", and then the subfolder inside named "Users".
You should see an option for "Full Name" and "Report Author License"; drag or "Insert" both of these into your report on the right.
You can include other data items if you wish depending on your needs (such as "Status" or "Supervisor"); when you're done, choose "Save As", name the report something descriptive and save it to an appropriate location.

You'll now have a report you and anyone else in your enterprise with access to the Reports tab can run when they need to check on who has WI Authorships.

Good Luck Tom & Addie!

Tim Low — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:08:00 GMT

We're very proud of the team over at Chase Paymentech including Tom Bannon and Addie Monson. Chase is doing some very smart things with Daptiv in their organization, and they're now nominated for an award!

Chase is a finalist in the Computerworld Best Practices in Business Intelligence competition in the Innovation and Promise in Business Intelligence category.

Winner will be announced at Computerworld's Business Intelligence Perspectives Conference, being held at the Arizona Biltmore Resort & Spa, in Phoenix, AZ September 8-10.Congratulations, and good luck. Please let us know if you win.

Speed--the Value of Fast Value

Tim Low — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:04:00 GMT

We recently shared some metrics we've been tracking for the past 3 quarters on how much time it takes our new customers to go from 'subcribe to live'. Phil Wainewright, the well-known pundit on all things SaaS at ZDNET covered the news his blog this week. Here's some additional background on why our tracking of this set of metrics is important to us. The post also features our new customer, InterContinental Hotels Group, who discuss their use of Daptiv PPM to manage new hotel openings. Thanks, IHG!

What is Daptiv Subscribe to Live?

Subscribe to Live is Daptiv’s methodology for helping customers rapidly create value and realize a return on their investment through rapid and streamlined configuration, training and implementation.

Why is it called Subscribe-to-Live?

Subscribe to Live (or Daptiv ‘S2L’) is exactly that. It’s a measure of the number of business day’s between when the customer signs their subscription agreement with us, and the day that their solution is configured and being used by their user community to manage their day to day business.

Can you provide more background on the numbers in the press release?

We looked at customers that began their subscription and went live during the past three quarters of our operations—Q4 2007, and the first 2 quarters of 2008 ending June 30. During this period we implemented more than 200 organizations, the largest user community to go live during this time period was 1003 users, and the smallest was 11 users. The actual average subscribe to live metric is 29.81 days.

Why is Subscribe-to-Live important?

Business software is evolving rapidly. The advent of web 2.0 technologies and the software as a service business model have enabled vendors like Daptiv to throw out the old way of buying and delivering software. In the process, we are driving faster time to value and real benefits to customers which is what S2L is all about. It’s important to note as well that we’re not offering a consumer web tool or a simple product for social network or collaboration although those are elements of our offering. We are helping organizations manage diverse and complex business processes, and they are taking advantage of the flexibility and configurability of our platform to achieve this speed.

Isn’t Rapid Return on Investment Common to All Cloud Computing?

Not necessarily. Business applications delivered in the SaaS model still require you to think about and implement features and tools that support and map to your business process. Not all cloud computing vendors provide the same level of flexibility and configurability. A key enabler of our fast time to value is the flexibility and rapid configuration tools built into the Daptiv SaaS offerings.

How much is this costing Daptiv customer?

Our typical customer spends approximately 25% of their first year subscription contract price on professional services for configuration, coaching, training and education. So if you are paying $100,000 for an annual subscription, you would spend approximately $25,000 to get up and running in less than 30 days, your people would be trained, the software would be configured to your business process needs, and you would be prepared enhance and modify your environment going forward.

Our S2L approach is heavily focused on coaching so that we leave knowledge and power behind when our consultants leave.

Summer ’08 Brings the Greenhouse

Eric Bergman — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:43:00 GMT

With Daptiv PPM Summer ’08, we've added the Greenhouse to the Daptiv Community, a new part of your experience with us as a vendor that makes you part of Daptiv’s innovation and product development processes. The Greenhouse is a new tab within the online user community where our users can submit product ideas, vote on ideas they would like to see implemented, and collaborate with the Daptiv Team on ideas that are currently in development. (Note: You must be a Daptiv customer and logged into the Community to access the Greenhouse tab.) The Greenhouse is an innovation within the product development community - so much so that the story made the cover of Business Week's "Innovation" section last week:
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/jun2008/id20080611_656376.htm?chan=innovation_innovation+%2B+design_top+stories
The Greenhouse has been in a private beta since YouCon '08, our annual user conference earlier this year. During this period customer participation was fantastic with 241 ideas, 1380 votes, and 268 comments as of the official go live this morning. During the beta period we implemented five ideas with our Spring '08 release. More importantly, as a result of the voting that has occurred thus far we have adjusted our roadmap accordingly. We bumped two features up in priority so that we can deliver them sooner than planned (see the In Progress section under the greenhouse tab). We are looking to do the same with other ideas in the near future.
The Greenhouse has already become an extremely valuable application for the Daptiv Team and has changed the way we prioritize our roadmap and collaborate with our customers. We look forward to receiving thousands of ideas. Ideas will be aligned with our strategic direction and evaluated against the amount of effort required to implement them so that we are sure to deliver as much value as possible in a timely manner. Of course, not every idea will get executed, but the power of community will prevail.
The Greenhouse is live - let's see what we can grow!

Some New Tips and Tricks for You!

Kevin — Mon, 19 May 2008 17:55:00 GMT

Hi Everyone,

Today marks the beginning of a new initiative here in the User Education team. We're going to begin posting some tips for common problems that you may run into with Daptiv PPM. Some of these may be documented elsewhere, but we are working with the Support team to get some of the more common problems addressed here. We'll get these out to you as they come up, hopefully at least one a week. These will be in addition to any other tips from other areas of the company.

If you have been through something and would like us to add it to the blog for others to see, feel free to email me directly at ktate(at)daptiv.com.

Our first tip is about seeing new project types in custom views. When you create a new project type and create some projects of that type, remember that the custom views you have set up for the Projects tab won't automatically display those projects until you include the project type in the definition of the view.

To Update Your Custom View:

Click the Projects tab.
Click More Views and select the view you want to edit.
Click Edit Current View.

The Edit Custom View window will appear, listing all the current project types in your enterprise.
Check the box next to the project type you want to include in your custom view.
You can make other changes to your view by clicking Next Step or you can click Skip To..., then Name and Save to finish the change.
Click Finish and Save.

Daptiv PPM Spring ’08 is LIVE

danderson — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 23:47:00 GMT

Daptiv PPM Spring ’08 went live April 12, bringing together several enhancements to help you make Daptiv the single source of truth for your Mid-Office.

There are features in Spring '08 to make it easier to get data out of Daptiv PPM (Recurring Report Scheduling, Export Custom Views to Excel/PDF, Web Services) features to make it easier to get data into the system (Import Projects, Web Services), and several user experience enhancements (Remember My Settings, Capacity Planner Performance) – since good user experience leads to more adoption, more data & even more visibility for your business. We’ve also rolled out some features to give easy access to information about your Daptiv PPM service (What’s New, Inline System Status Notices). This release is a natural follow-up to our Fall ’07 release, in which we joined its rich native PPM data capture, custom views and custom data with browser-based reporting and dashboarding tools to create Work Intelligence™ -- giving companies complete visibility into the managed work in their enterprise.

Thanks for your support and enjoy Daptiv PPM Spring ’08.

Links:

Spring ’08 Web Page

About Daptiv PPM Spring ’08 (Documentation)

Spring ’08 Data Sheet

Improving Online Help

Kevin — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:33:00 GMT

Hi, I'm Kevin Tate and I'm a Technical Writer here at Daptiv. I've been with the company for over 4 years, and some of you may know me from my time in the Support department here.

Now that I'm writing the documentation (online help, white papers, configuration guides and user manuals) I'm wondering what we can do better and I'm hoping that you might have some input regarding things you run into in Daptiv PPM that are under documented (or possibly undocumented). Our help has consistently improved, but occasionally we run into items that we realize were overlooked.

So, if you think of anything that new users (or old pros) have trouble understanding, comment on this blog or send me a private message by clicking on my name.

Thanks!

Kevin

Expanding your thoughs and capitalizing on your Daptiv investment

John Filicetti — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:59:00 GMT

With the new power of the Work Intelligence (WI) Advanced Report Builder (ARB), I am asking you to take a look at the possibilities you now have to create new reports and perform analysis within Daptiv. Many users have come to me asking how to capture or put more information into Dynamic Applications (DAs) to create views and reports. In many cases, the information is already in Daptiv and you have to shift your paradigms to think about harvesting and analyzing this information by using ARB.

Task work and task cost details are in the solution, you may just have to whiteboard what you are trying to accomplish and use the power of ARB to accomplish your goal. The process I suggest you take is:

Whiteboard your data input, the processes you want the data to go through, and then your data output.
Next, work backwards and be sure the data you want out is actually in the solution. If not, you may have to add custom fields or aggregate information from applications by using the aggregated custom field.
If the output data is not in the form you desire, you may have to transform it in Daptiv or transform it when you run your report.
Design your report format on the whiteboard or prototype it using MS Visio, MS Excel, or MS Word.
Create your report.

Status reports currently taking hours per project per week may be a click away and will soon be able to be scheduled to run when needed. If the Daptiv administrator puts their minds to work, WI can provide immediate return and a TON of information and decision support.

Justification for Creating and Maintaining a PMO - A Proposal to Consider!

John Filicetti — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:53:00 GMT

Overview What is the price of missing critical project dates? Who is accountable for all everything coming together at the right time for all projects? Can you identify and resolve potential delays in your portfolio of projects or the status of all your projects? A Program or Project Management Office (PMO): Matches business goals with appropriate technology platform or solutions Provides centralized control of all projects under the program umbrella Reduces time to market Increases communication...(read more)

Nice to meet you! -- Support at YouCon

DaptivKB — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:20:00 GMT

YouCon '08 was a fantastic experience for the Daptiv team members who had the opportunity to participate (including Steve Axford, Tina Halliday & myself) in San Diego earlier this year - it was rewarding to finally put faces to the voices we hear on the phone every week, helping to further solidify the relationships we've been building over the years.

Based on the invaluable feedback we received at our Support Round Table, we're working even harder to increase the visibility, communication and 'time to resolution' for your open issues, in part through the expanding Daptiv Community [http://community.daptiv.com]. We remain steadfast in our efforts to improve based on your experiences in Daptiv, and look forward to continuing our role in helping you manage your enterprise successfully.

It was great to finally meet you - hope to see you online!

Kristin Bennett

Daptiv Support Team

Daptiv YouCon 08

Tim Low — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 01:38:00 GMT

Well, I'm back in Seattle (oddly the sunniest place this week between San Diego, San Francisco and here...). But we had a phenomenal experience with our customers and the other attendees at YouCon '08.

First a couple of informal "awards"

Best use of props in a presentation Award -- Tom Bannon and his team from Chase Paymentech (who would've known that hardhats could do all that?)

Longest Trip Award -- Charl Morkel from Blue Nova, a Daptiv implementation and consulting partner from Australia.

Biggest Secret But Not A Secret Award -- Daptiv Connect, our new Integration Service

We really wanted to accomplish 3 things with YouCon this year:

Provide an opportunity for our customers to network and share ideas
Interact ourselves with people in our customer community from around the world
Share our plans and vision, and solicit feedback on how we can do better

I think we accomplished all three. For those of you who couldn't be there here's a quick summary of the announcements we made, and a little bit about what it was like:

Daptiv's Year in Review for 2007-- Jeff Pancottine opened the event, and talked about our our business performance and key investment areas for last year. In a nutshell: in 2007 we have more customers, higher bookings, higher revenues, and we made significant investments in world class infrastructure to deliver our on-demand solutions.

Our Vision for Collaborative Business Apps and Managing Work in the Enterprise was shared by Christian Smith. He discussed many strategies and themes we've developed over the past several months that are driving our product release plans including our recognition that combining the structure of project management and the freedom and agility of good collaboration tools makes a more compelling whole than either apart. He also shared the vision we have for helping our customers manage their WORK which of course will include projects, but also many activities that might not fit that formal definition. Another key theme discussed by Christian was the importance of visibility and how our vision for work intelligence is part of that objective of better managing work for business results. Those of you who have already dived into using the Work Intelligence capabilities in our Fall Edition 07 service are probably starting to figure that out.

Daptiv Product Roadmap -- was shared by Eric Bergman from Daptiv, and highlighted things such as our plans for delivering Daptiv PPM in new languages in 2008, where we're taking our services in the future to offer more flexibility, new capabilities for creating more collaborative business applications, and also how we're changing and enhancing the experience around certain core features of our PPM service in the next year.

Introducing...The Daptiv Greenhouse! -- Nicole Shaw, a solution designer at Daptiv, introduced the Greenhouse. The Daptiv Greenhouse is part of this community site, and is our new forum and tool for gathering innovative ideas and product suggestions from our community. The Greenhouse is part of our commitment to collaborating with you on what we bring to market, and will provide you with visibility into what your peers think, and how we plan to respond in terms of new product releases. The Greenhouse will be in beta for the next two months, and we invited our YouCon attendees to join. We will share more information around this with everyone after our beta period.

Daptiv Connect -- in San Diego at YouCon we introduced our new innovation service called Daptiv Connect. Chris Broyles, our VP of professional services along with Greg Moerbe from Pervasive Software with whom we've partnered to create and deliver Daptiv Connect, explained the link between visibility into information and the various approaches to bringing that data into your environment. A challenge for always, our new Daptiv Connect service provides a simpler, more maintable way to think about integration, and promises to bring real benefits when combined with the Work Intelligence features for dashboarding, analysis and reporting that we introduced with the Fall Edition of Daptiv PPM. Daptiv Connect promises an approach to integrating both SaaS to SaaS and SaaS to on-premise systems that is maintable and flexible compared with brittle custom integration approaches. Look for more information on Daptiv Connect in the days to come. It is available today and we demonstrated our first packaged integration between Daptiv PPM and Salesforce.com.

Anthony Williams, Co-Author of the zeitgeist book of 2007, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, opened the second day of YouCon with a keynote address to our attendees. Anthony's mix of examples from durable goods companies, consumer products companies, financial companies and the technology sector along with his demographic research findings on the way the next generation of workers is wired were revelatory for our attendees and we got a hugely positive response to his talk.

I must say that a real highlight of YouCon this year was the customer showcases presented by Darlene Fladager from MIT, David Ludwig from Dell Financial Services, and Tom Bannon, Tony Gamboa and Addie Monson from Chase Paymentech. There's nothing like hearing it from people who use our service everyday to manage their business, and each of these way really interesting in ways as different as their organizations. My thanks to each of them, it is quite striking and really rewarding to see our service adapted and focused on these real world challenges in business and in academia. The other attendees were rapt in each of these presentations.

So there it is for those of you who couldn't join us. Hope to see you next time...

Daptiv Customers and Partners Expected at YouCon '08 Next Week

Tim Low — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:39:00 GMT

Daptiv's user conference, YouCon '08 is happening next week in San Diego at the Paradise Point Resort & Spa. We're looking forward to seeing all of you there! Anthony Williams, Author of Wikinomics will keynote on Wednesday morning, and we'll be making some new service announcements as well as hearing about the future of Daptiv and a year in review from CEO Jeff Pancottine. I'll post some updates from YouCon next week while we're there.

Whitehouse Gets with the SaaS Program

Tim Low — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:33:00 GMT

I read this yesterday, and think it represents a major tipping point for SaaS companies (including Daptiv). Karen Evans, administrator of the OMB's Office of Electronic Government and Information Technology, endorsed software as a service. Read the story

Resource Management with Daptiv PPM

John Filicetti — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 03:49:00 GMT

Using all processes and tools available for Resource Management in Daptiv PPM, the following process flow can be accomplished. Output from any area of resource management from planning through actuals can be created using the Cross-Tab report in Daptiv Work Intelligence (WI). The process can be modified if an organization doesn’t want to use all functions of the Daptiv PPM Resource Management. For instance, if an organization doesn’t have a defined resource manager role, the team can be created using...(read more)

Daptiv Infrastructure Update

emoney — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 17:41:00 GMT

Hello PPM faithful! With the launch of the new Daptiv brand the Services team also launched a brand new state of the art Data Center. The new location hosts all PPM Shared hosted customers. The infrastructure was built from the ground up and includes new servers, new networking equipment as well as new centralized storage technology. The goal is to provide our world wide user base with second to none uptime, performance and stability. The team put a great deal of effort over many months planning and implementing the new infrastructure and we were happy to coincide the launch with the new Daptiv brand. Look for more exciting updates from the Services team in the upcoming weeks.

Regards,

Eamon Gavin

Data Center Manager

Daptiv PPM Training Page Overhaul

Mikeo — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:20:00 GMT

Hello Daptiv PPM users:

I wanted to bring to your attention some improvements that were made to the training area when we upgraded our on-demand (hosted) customers from eProject PPM6 to Daptiv PPM Fall ’07.

To see these changes, click View Training from the Help and Support Global Menu.

With the rebrand from eProject to Daptiv, we had the opportunity to reformat the training area and we implemented tabbed navigation similar to what you are used to seeing in PPM.

In addition, we added a new section for PPM documentation. Now you can now access user manuals, white papers, and other technical documentation from within the product.

The new role-based navigation allows you to quickly access the information pertinent to your PPM role.

Use the Previous and Next arrows to navigate between the available online resources.

Click the name of the online resource to view that content.

The User Education team here at Daptiv has lots of fresh ideas about role-based training and other educational materials we will begin providing to our users in future releases.

These new ideas will be introduced in upcoming User Education blogs and if you have ideas or suggestions for improvement in this area, please submit your feedback by responding to these blogs or emailing me directly.

Thanks,

Michael

Speeding up Daptiv load times

Justise — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

With the power of our new dashboard functionality you can do some pretty neat things, though one of the largest benefits was the ability to create a dashboard with no parts. An empty dashboard should give enormous gains in terms of loading times as you will have a small base page and have the added advantage of not having to download any of the extra images or wait for the loading of the parts themselves.

In dealing with file sizes, your new dashboards page will be around 41k without any dashboard parts. Also if this is your first time to this page you'll have additional files such as scripts and images to download, which could total around 169k for your total transfer time. Typically you won't have to download those extra files, but it’s still something that you might be concerned about.

On other end of the spectrum, your default dashboard (such as mine on our local internal server) which probably has one of all the components, would be around 134k and including its ancillary files can get up to 300k and beyond.

The Daptiv User Experience team is very focused on getting these sizes down; we've implemented compression and new caching systems into our code base to allow you to do your work faster. We'll be reducing the amount you have to consistently download each page refresh these next few months, and in the future we hope the amount of dashboard parts on your dashboard won't be a loading time concern. Until then, we suggest that if you’re not using the dashboard components hide them for your default view, and build some other views to track all your wonderful data.

A Fallen Leaf is Nothing More Than a Summer's Wave Goodbye

Eric Bergman — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 18:32:00 GMT

In Seattle you always know Fall is here when the dew arrives in the morning and the day brings enviable rain or overcast. At my house the seasonal shift manifests itself in the form of hand sized leaves falling from my larger than life maple tree. For Daptiv and our customers this Fall brings a new UI brand\skin and the the industry's first on-demand Work Intelligence solution.

Work Intelligence (WI) is a set new enterprise class report authoring and dashboard tools. Coupled with project, resource, collaboration and dynamic application data. All on top of our organization's world class SaaS infrastructure. As you can see Work Intelligence is more than a feature or function - it is a holistic solution that will allow our customers to extend the value of Daptiv PPM to new departments, business operations, and end user audiences by providing insight and decision support into all work within IT and the mid-office. If you are interested in finding out more about WI check out this informal demo I recorded last week.

As always, our Fall '07 release contains additional features that continue to extend our existing functionally, quality, and user experience. On Monday, November 18th say good bye to Summer and hello to Fall and the future of Work Management in the mid-office.

The Scoop on Our New Name...

Tim Low — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 22:51:00 GMT

Jeff Pancottine, President & CEO, Discusses the Evolution of eProject to Daptiv

I recently spent a few minutes with Jeff to talk about the choice to change our name from eProject to Daptiv, and what it means for us as a company as well as to our customers. Here’s an excerpt of our conversation:

Tim: Why are you changing your company name from eProject to Daptiv?

Jeff: We wanted a name that was somewhat less specific than eProject—one that would allow us to continue to provide the world’s leading on-demand project portfolio management software, while also giving us more flexibility to introduce new services in the future. We also felt that the timing was right. We’ve had a phenomenal couple of years from a growth standpoint, and these things only get more difficult the bigger you become.

Tim: What does Daptiv mean?

Jeff: Well, as I mentioned we were looking for a name that was less specific, and that would be flexible as we grow our business. I think Daptiv evokes some things, but it’s not intended to “mean” anything. You’ll notice that even the typography of our new brand identity is a little bit casual, a little bit playful. We wanted an iconic brand, but also one that was approachable, and didn’t seem stodgy. I would be happy to hear from our customers, both old and new. Feel free to share with me what the name Daptiv has come to mean to you and your organization.

Tim: Does this mean that you are still innovating in the project portfolio management market?

Jeff: Yes, absolutely. We see projects and teams and portfolios as critical components to successfully manage work in the mid-office. We will continue to focus on delivering the best on-demand PPM software.

Tim: You mentioned the ‘mid-office’. Tell me more about that.

Jeff: Organizations have spent the past 20 years adding sophisticated technology to their business to manage transactions and reporting for back office financials and inventory, etc. and more recently, for customer interactions and transactions through CRM tools like Salesforce.com. The work that happens in an organization that’s not front office or back office, is what we call the MID OFFICE, and it’s where organizations’ competitive strengths lie. We think there’s enormous potential for organization to approach the teamwork and strategic initiatives, and yes, ‘projects’ in their business with a similar set of enterprise tools that also provide visibility via reporting, dashboards, quick and easy custom views and the like. So whether this is an IT portfolio, or a new product development and go to market process, or whether it’s planning for an acquisition, we think software can do more for organizations in the mid-office.

Tim: Is the company’s ownership changing?

Jeff: No, we continue to be a privately held company based in Seattle, and our new brand is a way for us to articulate a richer value-based story that includes project and portfolio management, but also goes beyond it to embody the idea of managing not just projects, but work.

Tim: What is Daptiv doing beyond PPM?

Jeff: Event in our current PPM service, Daptiv PPM, you can see that our set of tools provides not just project portfolio management applications, and things like resource management, which are core elements of the PPM software market; it also touches on the interconnected requirements of really managing work—things like integral collaboration services, the ability to create ‘DIY’ or do-it-yourself applications that actually map to business processes and needs that you have—which are perhaps adjacent to the core project portfolio management elements, but also relate to managing work in the enterprise.

Tim: What do you think makes Daptiv different from other PPM software vendors, and more broadly from other tools people use to manage their day to day work?

Jeff: We have a mantra at Daptiv—it’s 4 words--YOU-WORK-EASY-ON-DEMAND. These really embody how we are driving our business, and how we are offering value to our customers in helping them address the real business management challenges they face.

You—is important because we see business software changing and evolving. 10 years ago, it was ok to design software with a bad UI because with back office applications, there were relatively few users interacting regularly with the system. Today--and especially since we focus on managing work—we have thousands of individuals interacting with our software every hour. This means that we need to think about how it feels to you. Whether you are a C-level executive just logging in for a dashboard snapshot, or whether you are a team member on a new product development project, we believe that the software should allow you to make the choice about how you view it, how you interact with your data, and be flexible enough to accommodate that.

Work—represents the evolution of our focus on projects. We’ve come to understand that while organizations definitely want better tools to manage “projects”, they also really need better tools to manage work that might not be structured as a project. Our mission is not to make everyone into a project manager, it’s to help our customers better manage their work so that they can compete effectively. The mid-office has been largely relegated to the use of personal productivity tools—and these are great for the work you do alone. But the huge opportunity for organizations is to link personal and organizational productivity, and this can only happen with an integrated environment where tools for your own heads-down work come together with the bigger objectives your organization is trying to meet. This is where our new capabilities for Work Intelligence really shine. Not only does Daptiv give your teams tools to manage day to day work, but it now provides you with an easy way to report on share and visualize data to help understand what’s actually happening with the strategic work in your organization.

Easy—this is closely related to our focus on you. It has become more important to make software easy and here’s why—it’s nice for the end user, and it helps them do their job better. BUT, it has a bigger impact. If our tools are easy to use, it means that our customers will have users actively contributing data to the environment. This participation and contribution is what drives visibility into the work that’s happening in an organization, and ultimately allows managers to make much smarter decisions because they have better data. It’s a two-fold payoff.

On-demand—this is perhaps the biggest change in the business software arena in the past decade. The growing ubiquity of internet access means that organizations are no longer need to depend solely on their own IT departments. They can now rent services for a duration that makes sense to their business, and the vendor (us!) handles uptime, hardware, maintenance, networking, access, etc. All of these services are part of our delivery model, and you as a customer do not have to worry about it. With on-premise software, you have to procure hardware, install software, update software, update servers, re-start servers and monitor the operating environment. This takes employees, often several people, and of course you have to pay their salaries and benefits. You also have to pay for power to run these systems and cool these systems. Increasingly, savvy organizations are realizing that on-demand business software makes sense. With software as a service (SaaS) you focus on your business process and their unique competitive differentiators, and leave the mundane aspects of service delivery to us. You always have the latest and greatest features, and all you need to do is pay a monthly subscription and have a browser to access the service.

Tim: Thanks, Jeff. Let’s do this again real soon!

Integrating eProject Dynamic Applications with Salesforce.com, Part 1

emarone — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 13:51:00 GMT

This is the first in a series of articles on how to send information from Salesforce.com (SFDC) to eProject. In this example, we’ll use a simple eProject Dynamic Application (DA) web form to create a SFDC S-control for creating a new eProject record from SFDC data.

Note: The bulk of this work takes place in SFDC, so implementing this kind of integration requires experience with SFDC administration, particularly with S-Controls, and HTML formatting skills.

Getting Started

For this example, I’ll use an RFP request Dynamic Application for a professional services organization. The workflow is that when a services RFP is requested as part of a sales opportunity, the Sales Executive will generate a new RFP request in SFDC by clicking a custom link on the SFDC Opportunity record. This will load the DA webform in SFDC and pre-populate it with key data from SFDC, eliminating duplicate data entry and ensuring data consistency between the systems.

I’ve included screenshots illustrating this process. Click the inline thumbnails to view the full-size screenshot.

Step 1: Create the Dynamic Application

Here is the DA, already created in eProject, with some sample data to demonstrate the field types:

Step 2: Create the Web Form

From within the project where you wish to manage the data, select Configure Web Form from the DA menu. Check the Enable Web Form checkbox, select the fields you wish to collect, and set your success/fail redirects:

Click Save and Generate HTML, then copy the code to a blank text file:

You don’t need to save the text file as an HTML file. You just need to capture the form code so you can move it over to SFDC.

Step 3: Create the S-Control

In the SFDC Setup area, click Build -> Custom S-Controls, then click the New Custom S-Control button to begin. Give the S-Control an appropriate Label, Name, and Description. Set the Type to HTML, and then paste the web form code into the Content field:

Click Save, and you’re now ready to associate the S-control with a custom link

Step 4: Create the Custom Link

Navigate to Customize -> Opportunities -> Buttons and Links and click New in the Custom Buttons and Links section. Give the link an appropriate Label, Name and Description. Select the Detail Page Link, or you may choose to create a button if you wish. The end result will be the same. Select the desired link behavior (for this example, we’ll show it in the existing SFDC window), select Custom S-Control as the content source, and then select the correct S-control:

Click Save, and click OK to clear the page layout notification, and you’re almost ready to test your new S-Control.

Note: Although you can create the webform directly in the link definition, I prefer to use an S-Control, which can then be reused elsewhere in SFDC, and it makes it much easier to “upgrade” the link by simply swapping out the S-Control and not having to rewrite the live link code.

Step 5: Add the Custom Link to the Page Layout

Navigate to Customize -> Opportunities -> Page Layouts, and Edit the layout where you want to add the link. Drag the new link to the Custom Links section and Save the changes.

Step 6: Test the Link

Open an Opportunity and verify the new link appears under the Custom Links section:

Click the link, and the webform is displayed in SFDC:

Complete the fields:

Click Send. The redirect is displayed:

Return to eProject and verify the record is created:

Step 7: Auto-populating the Form with SFDC Data

Return to SFDC and edit the S-Control. You can use the SFDC Merge Fields to insert data from the Opportunity into the DA form and save your users some data entry.

Note: This part can be a little tricky and it’s recommended that someone who is comfortable working with HTML forms make these modifications. The default webform code won't be the prettiest example of HTML code you've ever seen, but it's far from the worst. Before I get started with this portion of the process, I like to put line breaks between the table rows to make it a easier to locate the form field I want to work with.

Scroll down the web form code and locate the <table> tag, it will be near the bottom of the code:

To auto-populate the Account Executive field, position the edit cursor between the apostrophes for the value attribute:

Select Opportunity from the Select Field Type dropdown, and then select Owner Full Name from the Insert Field dropdown, which adds the Merge Field code into the input tag as default value:

Repeat to insert other Merge Fields as appropriate. For the Description field, which is a long text field, simply insert the Merge Field between the opening and closing <textarea> tags:

Save your edits and re-test the link:

Looks pretty good! All of the fields here have been automatically populated by either Opportunity or Account data, and the user has the opportunity to add comments or clarifications in the Description field before submitting it.

In this example, I modified the form formatting a bit by reducing the columns in the Description text area to prevent horizontal scrolling, and I got rid of the date format caption for the RFP Due Date field. You can also format the fonts, colors, and other aspects of the webform to match your standard stylesheet, branding, or even just make it look a little more like an SFDC page.

In Part 2, I’ll show you how to use a webform-driven S-Control bypass the eProject webform and validation altogether and automatically submit data from SFDC to eProject.

Top 10 Ways to Use eProject DeskDocs

danderson — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 23:21:00 GMT

eProject’s DeskDocs, new in PPM6 Summer ’07 Edition, gives you a Windows Explorer view of all the documents in all the projects you have permissions for, making online document management simpler than ever. Here are just a few of the ways you can now use DeskDocs:

1. Install DeskDocs from anywhere:

a. from a Project (Project Menu > Documents)

b. from the Documents Tab

c. from the Utilities Download Page (get there by clicking on your UserName and selecting “Download Utilities”)

2. Uploading multiple docs? Definitely use DeskDocs for this purpose. Move them all with one click and drag; save the extra clicks. Avoid Carpal Tunnel.

3. Have Document folders in PPM6 that you’re always adding to, or updating? Save yourself time and make a Shortcut on your desktop straight to that folder (right-click in DeskDocs on the folder you need, and save the Shortcut to your desktop.)

4. Use DeskDocs to get a team to really use a central documents repository. If you make it easy, people will do it.

a. Have a DeskDocs shortcut(s) created on the desktops of each person in a project team

b. Tell them to drag all the project docs into this folder

c. Every team member can do that

d. New project? New shortcuts

e. When teams share and collaborate, project ROI improves.

5. Save directly from Word, Excel, Acrobat, etc. without even going back to your desktop. For example in Microsoft Word, you can go to File > Save As > DeskDocs and navigate to the exact eProject folder where you want to save your Word doc. Now, how cool is that?

6. Share anything. Remember, you’re not limited to Office documents (e.g. Word, Excel, PPT). Some businesses need to share diagrams, pictures, movie files, any types of files. Share ‘em all, we say – the cool stuff and the boring stuff. Take advantage of the now-expanded storage in PPM6.

7. Move entire document folder structures. For example, know you’re working on a project that will require deep folder hierarchies? Create them on your desktop, and transfer them over as a set.

8. Configure as needed. You can configure Deskdocs manually for other operating systems like Vista (see PPM6 Help). Or, to trigger notification emails for each document created in DeskDocs, you can change the project or enterprise settings.

9. Deep-Six that document management system you’re currently paying money for, and make eProject PPM6 your official system of record for collaborative documents.

10. Find your own creative uses for DeskDocs – we created this flexible tool for you. Let us know what you do with DeskDocs.

Hot Time, Summer in the City

tlow — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 23:07:00 GMT

Well, we’re moving into Summer, and it’s been an eventful few weeks here at eProject.

First up, we are almost ready to go live with PPM6 Summer Edition ’07! July 7 is the go-live date. This is a really exciting release for us, and we hope for you too. Summer Edition ‘07 includes lots of customer requested enhancements to things like timesheets and authentication and login that will make your life easier if you’re a user or an administrator. The real exciting pieces of Summer Edition though are the brand new ways that you’ll be able to use PPM6 in tandem with your productivity software like Microsoft Office. Summer Edition features the end of beta for our Oulook Integration. You can now update tasks from within outlook and have changes automatically update within your PPM6 environment. You can also create appointments in Outlook that sync with your PPM6 calendar and vice versa.

We’re also delighted to introduce eProject Deskdocs—a brand new capability that allows you to drag and drop documents from your desktop to projects in your PPM6 enterprise, all the while maintaining access and authentication controls as their set up in PPM6.

For those of you who don’t Google eProject every single day, I wanted to also share a couple pieces of news:

eProject is positioned in visionaries quadrant in the brand new for 2007 Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT Project Portfolio Management Applications. We are the only on-demand vendor in the visionaries or leaders quadrants. The new Magic Quadrant was introduced last week by Gartner anlysts Matt Light and Daniel Stang at their annual PPM Summit in Boston. We were there waving the on-demand flag, and ended up being known as “the flip flop guys” (this is because we were wearing Summer Edition flip flops and T-shirts, not because we're prone to changing our positoin on controversial topics...). IT PMO Director Madeleine Kerr from C&S Wholesale Grocers delivered a case study about C&S’s selection and implementation of eProject even though they had licenses to another packaged PPM solution as part of a deal with their mainframe tools vendor. Attendees were very impressed with Madeleine and her story about C&S. Thanks, Madeleine!
Closer to home, we were delighted to be a finalist in this year’s Best Companies to work for in Washington by Washington CEO Magazine. We are #3 in the medium business class this year (up from #12 in the small business category last year). We really do have great people at this company, and it shows up in awards like this.